Four Potential Deaths Ianto Jones Avoided
by Luna Tiger
Summary: And One He Didn't // Fire, electricity, force, propulsion. None as real as the absolute. Ianto-centric.


**Title**: Four Potential Deaths Ianto Jones Avoided & One He Won't  
**Fandom**: Torchwood  
- _Characters_: T3 team (both canon and speculated), Lisa, OC (Romi)  
**Rating**: PG-13  
**Summary**: _Fire, electricity, force, propulsion. None as real as the absolute._  
**Notes**: SPOILER for **TW 2x6**. There might not be a series bible, but someone must have passed around a memo for book set 2 (tell me someone didn't pick up on a very critical and can't-be-coincidence theme in Trace Memory and The Twilight Streets?). And it all but said: Ianto's gonna die from Torchwood. Truth.

- a - l - t - e - r - n - a - t - i - v - e -

1) It could have been fire.

"Out, out!"

No one waited to be told twice. The entire seven man division scattered to the four corners of the floor, and while six of them made for the stairs everyone else would be cramming themselves down, Ianto was torn to do so. Run to safety, or crawl up eight flights and find Lisa who was either dead or on her way outside at this moment.

The choice made it hard to breathe. The gamble of not knowing, of having to chance luck they she was still alive somewhere. But in the end, he didn't have to make the choice.

"Exterminate!"

2) It could have been electricity.

"Shit, shit!"

Owen always did have an exemplary vernacular to describe the current situation at hand. But even his best didn't quite cover the severity of having a half-finished Cyberman about five metres from where they all roughly stood, spread apart with guns trained to impede, but not kill, because previous encounters said that would be useless.

"Jack, please," Lisa begged, trying to keep herself between the Webley and the walking machination, but also trying to keep one eye on said walking machination, because even she didn't trust the situation. "You can't kill him. You _can't_; we have to help him."

"You can't help what doesn't want help," Jack growled, and he was furious. Never trust London, he always told himself, and the one time he did (hiring Lisa Hallet), it screwed them over to _this_, a boyfriend-she-said-was-_dead_ partially converted and no doubt they would have been an attractive couple pre-Void Fucking, but right now, he wasn't seeing much of it. "And you can't change what can't be undone!"

"_There has to be a way!_" she screamed. The amount of pain in her voice spoke volumes of what she had to sacrifice to come this far, what had to be lost time and time again, all in the name of Hope. "Don't shoot him!"

"Why not?!" Owen cried. "Your boyfriend's the _bloody fucking Terminator_! And I will not be Hasta La Vista'd!"

But Hope was a fragile thing, and now it was crushed under the weight of three terrifying words, now that the Cyberman was done processing through its assessment of the Hub and the five humans inside it:

"Resistance is useless."

- r - e - v - i - s - i - o - n -

3) It could have been force.

"No, no!"

A toss through the air by a beloved, meant to drown him in the shock to his diaphragm. He survived on another beloved's kiss.

4) It could have been propulsion.

"Owen, Owen!"

A bullet once marked for him, buried in the chest of another by the whim of someone unseen and never acknowledge. He survived where a doctor didn't.

- f - u - t - u - r - e -

X) **It will be absolute.**

"Hey, hey!"

It was cold, growing colder by the second, and Ianto couldn't focus his sight on any one object as his head swung weakly from side to side, trying to register why it hurt, and not collectively acknowledging the severity of the situation or that he had been _impaled_....

"Ianto!"

Mickey was worried. It showed. Ianto wasn't sure why, but somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew there was a reason that Mickey was backed by the hazy cooperbrowngreysteelgreenblah of metal long left alone to rot under oxidation. Which only confirmed they were still inside.

"Romi! We need you. Second floor, waterside. It's bad."

He wondered what happened that needed their doctor's attention. Romi. Rosemary Hurwitz. Huerron. Alien in guise. Physician. Had to replace Martha and Owen with someone as good as them. Had to replace them, but could never be in place of them.

"C'mon, don't die on us. Finding a suit for your funeral's gonna be hell."

He would have laughed, except he felt too out of sorts to bother. Breathing got a little easier as his head was angled upwards, and the pressure he hadn't realized was there pressed harder somewhere on his body, and the cry of pain that followed came out a muted grunt somewhere in the back of his throat.

"Oh sweet Mother Mercy. Here, put him down, and give me your coat. This the only way up? Then go down the stairs and I don't care if you have to shoot him a couple times, don't let Jack up here."

Mickey vanished, only to be exchanged for a woman with round cheeks and pulled back mahogany hair, not looking at him like Mickey had been. Already she was whipping away her eyeglasses, undoing the illusion of two blue eyes in place of one blue and one pitch-black. The pressure was back on his side, and this time his cry was more or less heard, if not somewhat weakened.

"The worst place possible to get your side torn out. Absolutely nothing sanitary about processing plants, never mind the conveniently abandoned ones."

Now she was looking at him, with a mini-torch aimed in his eye and he could just barely feel the other hand scurrying to jerk open his tie, shirt, jacket. And when the light vanished, the jerking didn't take much longer. But as the cold touch of the resessor nodes fell to spark heat on his numb chest, Ianto's blackening vision was already dimming to pitch. There was so much left to do; who would finish up?

"...sorry..."

"Ianto!"


End file.
